thanks for all the replys, ill consider each approach carefully before i decide on anything major, but i have been discussing this with a colleague and come up with some ideas which ill explain.
ill try to explain the situation in a little more detail for those of you who are interested.
The basic idea of the research is related to the position of the hair on a fruit fly wing which usually points in one direction (the distal corner of the hexagonal cell eg the far right). the two mechanisms mentioned propagate the proteins through the cell to form the concentration of protein at the distal edge to point the hair. sometimes the cell mutates, and causes different properties of the cell hair to change, but we are most concerned with not the local effect of this but the global effect of the direction of hairs, because if one points in the wrong direction then we get a similar effect to iron filings on paper and a magnet and the swirling motions u see, plus other distinct alginments of hairs which are not explained fully yet.
with regard to the model of the cell i have come up with the following outline of the problem.
An object of type CELL can point to its 6 neighbours (or 3 if at an edge).
This is comprised of 6 objects of type WALL.
The WALL object is comprised of 10 COMPONENT objects which constitute the concentrations of different proteins. (note increasing the resolution from 10 to 100 will most likely not increase accuracy - so 10 will suffice plus im keeping it simple to start with).
The equations dealing with the signalling will be dealt with within the WALL objects, and equations for the feedback in the CELL object. The COMPONENT objects contain the concentrations of proteins and various other things, like Inhibitor proteins to affect signalling.
The CELL's can be stored either as a 2D array of Cells or another data structure.
At the moment im trying to figure a simplistic method of doing this in a 2d array, so far this is on paper but ill try to explain the structure. We have a cell (n,m)
Code:
n,m+1
n-1 \_____/
m-1/ \ n+1,m
__/ \__
\ n,m /
n-1 \ / n+1,m-1
m /--------\
/ n,m-1 \
From this we can see a simple method of a 2d array, ill have a look at this later and see if i can code up the basic classes.